


Multiverse Theory

by BBJ_3



Category: X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: First Class (Comics)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon Disabled Character, Dubious Consent, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Secondary Mutation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 23:35:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16820701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BBJ_3/pseuds/BBJ_3
Summary: Peter's thoughts on the multiverse and his father's relationship with Charles take the telepath down an unexpected path as confronting an old wound creates a new one.





	Multiverse Theory

An off-handed comment starts it all, but it comes from Peter, so there’s no telling how much he’s been tossing the thought back and forth in his head before saying it.

“He goes off, has a kid, and brings ‘em back here,” he murmurs, spinning in the chair beside Charles.

It’s not exactly what it’s like. At least, not with Peter or Wanda. Logan brought in Peter, who stayed for one reason or another and brought his sister. Lorna, however, fits the assessment. Either way, it isn’t the statement’s inaccuracy that concerns Charles. No, Peter has a conclusion, and what that conclusion might be could be far more insightful about the situation than Charles would like to be at the moment as he reads over the scant details he’d managed to find on the young girl – without Erik’s help, mind.

When Peter doesn’t elaborate quickly enough, Charles prompts, “And?”

“It’s like he’s building a family with you, right? He doesn’t trust anybody but you to raise his kids. I mean, he didn’t really have a choice with me and Wanda, but we wound up here anyway, and I bet if he has another kid out there, he’ll bring ‘em here too,” Peter suggests, and isn’t that a pretty picture? It brings up memories Charles wants to forget, but Charles pushes them aside. He’s a good teacher. Of course Eric wants his help when Erik doesn’t trust himself with anything but war. “Hank was talking about the multiverse, and I bet in the ‘verse where everything was the same but you were a girl – I bet he would’ve stuck around.”

For a full ten seconds, Charles’s mind goes blank. “Pardon?” he chokes, turning in his wheelchair to face Peter directly. “Erik and I have different philosophies on most things, and I can promise you – a womb wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference.”

“Yeah, it would! Cause he’d be able to complete his weird goal of filling the world with super powerful mutants, and you’d be the one having them as well as raising them, so he’d have to stay on your good side,” Peter argues.

And hadn’t that inspired the wrong sort of thought. With a quick parting word, Charles rolls himself across the manor to where Erik’s guest room has been set up. He’ll likely not stay for much longer than it takes for Lorna to settle in, and he’ll barely leave the room during that time beyond to do whatever it is he deems necessary to his cause, so Charles isn’t surprised at the shock evident in Erik’s posture – though not his face – when he opens the door to see the telepath glowering up at him.

“Move,” Charles commands – all niceties vanish as he enters and gestures for Erik to shut the door behind him.

“Charles, to what do I owe this visit?” It goes unspoken that Charles varies between pleased to see Erik when he stops by the manor and keen to avoid him – the truth either way is that Charles has never let Erik back in his bed save the one mess after they broke the taller man out of jail.

“Lorna was happy living with her aunt,” Charles says, knowing Erik knows this as well as he does. “There was no reason to bring her here – and if this is some sort of joke to you…” Charles grasps at control. None of this is Lorna’s fault, and he doesn’t want to discourage Erik from bringing his children here, but it hurts. Every single time – it hurts. “I understand you want your children safe, and this school will always be open to those who need safe haven, but a school isn’t a surrogate for those that love them.”

Erik’s eyes narrow. He doesn’t follow the conversation or see what inspired it, which for the two of them is unusual. Even when they keep to their own heads, they know each other – for better or worse – in ways no others do.

“Jealous, Charles?”

“Of what? Your capacity to procreate with humans regardless of your distrust for them? Your need to parade one child after another into my home as if to remind me I lost mine?” Charles retorts, and some understanding brew behind that sharp gaze, but it isn’t something new. There’s no shock at the remark. Simply a bland recognition of a reminded fact. “You knew…” The desire to retreat nearly overwhelms Charles, but it wars with a need for the truth – to lay everything bare between them. “You knew I was pregnant, and you left me. You left me trapped on that beach – our child dying inside me, and you disappeared.”

Erik’s face freezes into a mask like death. It’s the one he uses when he’s pretending to know what’s happening – pretending he was prepared for what’s coming, but Charles knows him better. He hadn’t known.

With his mind sounding the retreat, Charles bites his lip, shoving at the wheels of his chair in a desperate attempt to escape, but the metal sticks, grounded to the spot as Erik stares down at him with a gaze colder than ice. Charles doesn’t even have a chance to reach out and see what Erik’s thinking before his chair melts around him. The parts and pieces lifted him into the air.

“Erik!” he cries. “Let me go!”

But he receives no reply as he is gently laid on the bed. A chilling fear consumes him – that Peter was right. That a womb made all the difference to Erik, and if Erik knew Charles’ could still be filled…

Still, he can’t find it in himself to lie. His second mutation was strange - a secret even from himself until the doctors had found the source of Charles’ bleeding after the bullet had collided with his spine. He’d had to erase so many minds that day. Dealing with an active womb – though irregular and less frequent than most women – had been an aching reminder of what almost had been.

“Charles,” Erik whispers, falling over him. His fingers shoved up Charles’ shirt and lips pressed over the flat surface of Charles’s stomach – years too late. The second time Erik says his name, tear-filled eyes meet Charles’s own. Erik has never looked so lost. “Charles – my god, Charles, how much have I taken from you?”

“This, I suspect, is more for what you took from yourself,” Charles replies, for while the tears move him to remain still – to let this play out a bit longer rather than taking control of Erik’s mind and putting everything back to order, he doesn’t trust the other man. Likely, he will never trust him again.

“And – after – in the hotel?” Erik asks, recalling that one night, and Charles shakes his head.

“You’ll recall we had a fair amount of sex before the first conception. One time may be enough, but it wasn’t the right time for us,” Charles informs him – and how many days had Charles been relieved when their reunion came to nothing? How much more had it made him grieve?

“But we could,” Erik surmises, and he’s removing Charles’s clothes before the telepath can respond though the three words weren’t really a question.

It’s tempting to just let this go – to let Erik have him and lure the other man to stay even if it is just long enough to see Charles’s belly begin to round, but would he really stay? Perhaps fear of another miscarriage would have Erik at his side until the birth, but would it end there? Or would Erik wait until he’d recovered and then take him to bed again repeatedly until the rest of Charles’s fertile years were spent leaking at the breast with a babe inside and out?

Charles tries not to lie to himself anymore. He wants that. Wants to feel the flutter of his unborn child – the ones he never reached the first time. He yearns for the weight of a baby – his own – in his arms, but Erik’s? He has wanted Erik since the moment they met, and life without him has been learning how to breathe again – and it is getting easier each time Erik betrays him – each time he leaves – so the idea, while tempting, isn’t one that Charles is ready to fully embrace. He doesn’t want Erik if his womb is all that’s keeping the man around, and perhaps Peter’s right. Perhaps in the universe where Charles is a woman – perhaps she would have never known the betrayal because she would have realized she was pregnant – or at least suspected – and Erik would likely have known too because if Charles had known – he would’ve told Erik the second he saw him.

Though he isn’t responding – he hasn’t stopped Erik, and the man is proficient in his fucking, so before Charles’s over-thinking reaches an end, Erik slides home inside him, and – well – just once hadn’t worked before, so there’s no reason to believe it will now, so he allows Erik to embrace him. Relishes in the smooth slide of Erik’s cock into his body though the feeling is a bit strange – almost phantom like and so very similar and different to how it had been both before the bullet and after with the medicine. Charles has feeling in his cock and ass, so pleasure is there, but he can’t wrap his legs around Erik’s hips, and arching back to meet each thrust is maneuver of leverage he isn't familiar with.

They come together, and Charles imagines he’ll be strong. Imagines he’ll let Erik go if the man wants or push him away if the other attempts to breed him. It’s what he tells himself repeatedly – next time, he’ll say no. Next time, he’ll push Erik away or erase his mind (though he knows he’ll never manage that one). They don’t discuss what’s happening behind closed doors, but Erik stays long after he normally would go, and Hank seems suspicious, but it’s always the last time, so Charles assures himself that nobody need know. It isn’t like what they’re doing is bad. Erik treats him like something precious – which is familiar – but the dirty talk always goes German – as if he wants to hide what he’s saying from Charles rather than that he’s overwhelmed. Once or twice, Charles almost slips into his head – just enough to translate really – but Erik’s thoughts are loud enough above the murmurs (on purpose or not, Charles doesn’t want to know), so he stays away for fear of finding out that this all really is just to breed him.

He menstruates irregularly, so when the first one comes afterward, Charles is conflicted. He believes Erik will leave, and that will be that, but Erik comes, and when Charles explains the situation, he cooks and cuddles, and one night, they still fuck, so Charles is left concerned. Erik is far more dedicated to his new project than Charles expected. So many would be easier to impregnate, yet Erik remains at the manor – teaches alongside Charles – helps the children like Charles once wished he would, and it’s nerve-wracking.

A full year passes – four cycles, and any day, Charles expects, Erik will rage, demanding to know if Charles is purposefully stopping them from conceiving. It leaves him feeling raw and exposed, and it isn’t healthy. None of this is healthy.

And like it began, it’s Peter who inspires the end.

“I think you should tell him to leave,” Peter says, curled up on the chair across from Charles’ desk. He’s glaring out the window – where Erik is teaching Lorna.

Suddenly, it isn’t about them anymore. Peter is hurting. His father isn’t paying attention to him or his sister – instead, this strange half-sibling gets everything Peter likely dreamed about – an Erik who stayed, who taught, who cared…and it isn’t fair to Lorna to use that as a reason to send Erik away, but it gives Charles the strength to determine that he will not be the reason Erik is staying. If Erik remains afterward for Lorna, Charles will be there for Peter and Wanda. If not, then Lorna will connect with her half-siblings over the abandonment.

So Charles doesn’t seek Erik out, and when Erik comes looking for him in his study, Charles is in a plastic chair – Hank’s design. “Erik,” he greets.

“Are you going to remain locked up in here all night?” the metal-manipulator asks.

His tone is teasing, but his eyes narrow as they study the plastic where Charles sits. He’s likely also reaching out and sensing the lack of metal in the office overall – there are a number of thing which he could pull from elsewhere in the manor, but this is a statement. All metal has been removed from his office – courtesy of Hank and Raven.

“Not all night. I’ll be turning into bed soon,” Charles replies. A strange wave of relief passes through Erik, so Charles quickly cuts it off. “A bed you will not be in.”

Erik doesn’t ask why. Not exactly and he doesn’t throw a fit. He simply says, “I’m sorry.”

Charles blinks. “Pardon?”

“I’ve obviously done something to upset you,” the other mutant says, gesturing first at the chair and then the room. “Whatever it is, I apologize. Tell me, and I won’t repeat it.”

The reaction isn’t right. It isn’t Erik, and for a moment, Charles wonders if there is someone else like his sister, so he brushes against the surface of Erik’s mind, and beneath the determination to cross the metaphorical distance between them, there is panic.

Panic that Charles has reached his limit. Panic that whatever unnoticed offense is the straw that broke the camel’s back, which leads into guilt and self-hatred over Charles’s legs only to fold into the plastic chair and how he doesn’t deserve Charles’s trust, but he wants it. He wants – oh, the man may have lived like a martyr, but he yearns so deeply the ache echoes in the depth of Charles’s mind – and all those wants spiral around Charles.

Erik wants Charles in every way imaginable – as a friend, a lover, an ally – a teacher and mother to his children. He lusts for Charles. Almost touch-starved in his need. It’s strange and unreal that the man who walked away from him over and over wants, but this – apparently – is a floodgate opened on that first night when Charles raged and Erik realized the depths of what had been broken between them. From Erik’s perspective, it wasn’t a repeated weakness. Every time Charles imagined as the last, Erik viewed as the rekindling of their love. If Charles remained a bit colder than the first time – if Erik strives to woo Charles in his unpracticed ways – with patience to teach, which Erik didn’t have. With trinkets given to students because if Charles rejected even the smallest thing, Erik wouldn’t have been able to take it. He had endeavored to woo Charles through the students – by being the man Charles had once believed he could be, and beneath all that want, the beast Charles feared curls up like an injured cat.

The potential child – one which Charles feared Erik viewed as a weapon (be it as a population tool expanding mutants or one to be used by Erik to manipulate Charles’s heart) – is a symbol of everything Charles wanted Erik to believe possible. A world at peace – a world where Charles loved Erik again – trusted him again – needed him the way Erik needed the telepath, and wasn’t that all the more frightening because that world still had humans extinct.

In that moment, Charles could have relented. Admitted he yearned to trust Erik again and confessed his concern for Peter and Wanda and for humanity. Perhaps they could have raged in the familiar old debate about humanity and that could have broken them apart neatly and without Charles having to pretend he ever considered pushing Erik away for any other reason.

For a moment, Charles considers bridging the divide. Erik may hope to rekindle their love and that such – along with a child – would inspire Charles to agree (or simply not impede) Erik’s designs for mutantkind, but Charles doesn’t get the chance to over-think this time. A small mind – just beginning to form – flutters awake and reaches out, feeling the silent connection formed by one of its fathers to the other. And Charles pulls away from Erik’s mind. His heart fluttering as a new reason emerges to push Erik away.

“Charles?” Erik asks.

And Charles could take a thousand different paths – perhaps each is another universe, forming one way or another, but in this one – where their child grows within him, Charles cannot bear to break his heart again.


End file.
